On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
> The story on cosmic rays affecting memory is well-known. It was proposed
> as the reason why one of the early 4Kbit (I think) chips had a very high
> error rate. It was later found (I think) that the real reason was alpha
> particles from the radioactive decay of something in the (ceramic?)
> package of the chip.
Gordon Moore (founder of Intel) related a story at a dinner function I
attended last November about how Intel was trying to figure out a random
fault in one of their chips (I believe it was a RAM). Finally, one
engineer suggested cosmic rays, so they enclosed a system inside an igloo
of lead bricks and the problem never occured during the time the system
was inside the igloo (several weeks).
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Tue Jan 05 1999 - 22:52:49 GMT